The use case is a return to "dumb terminals." Many "Enterprises" already go as far as they can with remote desktop and VPNs but lots of enterprises would love to issue an employee a device that runs the entire OS remotely so that the device effectively becomes just a terminal and 100% of employee generated data stays within the origination's servers and networks. I'm not saying that this makes for a good employee experience, but it's a use case.

So does this sync all the machine state to the cloud? I thought they mostly used local storage.

I don't know about Os.js, specifically, but yes if you were going to implement a browser based OS for the purpose I described then local state would be relatively transient and state would be persisted on the enterprise side. There's no reason you need to use something like localStorage or indexedDb for anything, really. The only thing that buys you are performance and offline capabilities. But if security / keeping data "in the enterprise" is the priority then you can minimize what gets persisted locally.

My point was simply that no one is doing that. That isn't what these are for, and an enterprise that wants to provide a thin client desktop can't use anything that doesn't run the applications the business already uses, so they are going to be deploying an actual windows desktop hosted in the cloud using any of the many solutions available from tier 1 cloud provides or others to do that.

Back in the day we called them X Terminals. I had to work on one once and it was a pretty poor developer experience.

Think of buying a new laptop and not having to install anything. All your programs, files, and and settings are in the cloud. The programs open files from your cloud storage, without you having to download them first. So no user files and docs have to be stored on the machine.

Now, if the machine is only used to run such a desktop, then such an internet OS might run best on a chrome-book style device, with minimal storage for system data only, and locked down to run only the internet desktop. You could even store your entire config settings in the cloud, so when you log into the machine, it is automatically configured. So all you need to to acquire the hardware, and you are to use it immediately. No more mucking around with settings and installations and drivers and whatnot.

This setup is not good for every user in every situation, but in some scenarios it would be very useful.

Your first paragraph is a dystopic nightmare scenario.

Sounds great for enterprises who have strict regulatory or security requirements

Get laptop with all your company's business software preinstalled and maintained via cloud. Great for non-devs who mostly use email and office

I feel that the goal of "cloud computing" is done better using other technologies. Shadow.tech is a good example of this - it allows you to stream a powerful and capable windows machine to your computer. low latency, you benefit from the massive windows ecosystem that already exists, and you're not limited by local hardware, as a javascript OS (presumably) would be.